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Antihero

March 1, 2026
Addiction
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I drank for ten years, though the first ones shone with false brilliance. In college, alcohol was the point. Everything worth doing happened with a drink. Everything worth remembering blurred into nights that were never fully remembered at all.

For me, the point was never the buzz. I wasn’t interested in getting ‘tipsy,’ or laughter, or surface-level fun, the things that ‘happen.’ I drank to black out. It was always the destination. The apotheosis of the evening wasn’t the joke I told or the girl I kissed or the party I stumbled through, it was the moment when memory failed.

People like to call alcohol “liquid courage” but I never experienced it that way. Courage implies stepping more fully into your life, doing the thing you were afraid to do. I wasn’t looking for that. I wasn’t interested in being bolder or more present. What I wanted was absence. Blackout was about vacancy, not bravery. It was a release from the untreated depression and anxiety that made ordinary existence feel unbearable.

And for a while, it worked. Obliteration felt like mercy. The night would dissolve into static, and for a few precious hours I didn’t have to be myself. It was more than being drunk. Drunk meant dulled but still tethered. Blackout meant severed. The tether was gone, the loop was cut, silence at last.

But the myth or glamour of it couldn’t survive with time. The first blackouts felt shocking, almost profound. Later they were just math. If you keep drinking, eventually you black out. What I once romanticized as antihero self-destruction was really just the structure doing what it was designed to do. The system wrote the script, and I just followed it.

By the later years, alcohol wasn’t giving me anything. It wasn’t a gateway to transcendence. It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t fun. It was just a cure for the hangover it had caused the day before. I woke up sick and reached for the one thing that could help, even as it guaranteed it would return again tomorrow. The lie had long since revealed itself, but by then I was stuck in a closed loop.

Eventually, I quit. Not in a blaze of insight or a heroic moment of willpower. Not with a speech or a vow or an ultimatum. I quit because there was no other option left. My body was crumbling, my mind unraveling, my life was unlivable. Quitting wasn’t a choice. The decision had been made for me long before I claimed it.

That’s all there is to it: I drank for relief, and I quit for survival. The rest is details. The blackout-as-apotheosis, the antihero romance, the grand narrative of drinking as destiny; that was merely cover I laid over a decade of erosion.

I kept drinking until I couldn’t anymore.

Then, I stopped.

The Last Straw

February 1, 2026
Addiction
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For years I told the story like it was a deliberate arc of redemption.

The “last straw” wasn’t some spectacular unraveling of my life. I didn’t get a DUI. No partner staged an intervention. My friends and family weren’t delivering ultimatums. I had a good job, a strong work ethic, the appearance of stability. I was what they call a “high functioning alcoholic,” though I wasn’t functioning highly in any other area of my life.

In my version, the turning point was simple: I missed my coworker’s Fourth of July barbecue, someone I respected, someone I wanted to network with, a relationship I wanted to build. Out of all the things I had skipped or sabotaged because of drinking, this one was minor. But for whatever reason, that was the moment I decided to stop. I tell people that, and it happened in July 2017.

Only, that’s not what happened.

The barbecue was real. The thought, I don’t want to miss things like this anymore, was real. But nothing changed. Two months later, in September, I was sitting in a doctor’s office for something completely unrelated when the appointment took a hard left turn. Somehow the staff knew I was an alcoholic. Instead of running through the standard checklist, they brought in a social worker. No warning. She picked up the phone, called an outpatient clinic, and handed it to me. That was it. I was too hungover to argue.

It is a curious example of how memory reshapes itself. I carried the shame of being caught, of being “forced,” but wanted the dignity of self-selection, the cleaner narrative of redemption. So over time, the timeline shifted. The barbecue became the moment. The ambush at the clinic faded away.

I was already at Amazon then, working as a contractor. At the time, it was my foothold, the one piece of my life that still looked stable from the outside. I could feel everything else slipping, but if I could turn that contract into a full-time role, I could convince myself I was not really in free fall.

That is why I really went to rehab. Not because I had hit bottom, but because I thought it might save my job. In my head, the equation was simple: fix the drinking, nail the interview, land the FTE. Rehab was not about healing; it was about salvaging the only thing I still valued, my work.

When the interview came, I was sober, but too fragmented to perform. The whole thing was a trainwreck from the first question. I watched myself blow it in real time. When the rejection email came, it merely confirmed: rehab did not work, and neither did I.

I quit the program before finishing. And then I drank for another two years.

Gravity

December 21, 2025
Addiction
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I woke up in my apartment with no phone or wallet. Apparently, I had driven home blackout drunk over a span of ninety miles. With dread, I realized I had to go back to Bremerton, because my phone and wallet were still over there. But more than that, there was an understood social contract stating that I had to be present for Geoff’s bachelor party no matter what. I grabbed a jar of quarters and my checkbook and drove back without GPS.

Of course, everything planned that day cost money. I had canceled my cards the night before, and so I had none. I offered to pay for the arcade with quarters, but everyone refused. Allowing me that small dignity would amount to grace I did not deserve. I had to be present because of the social contract, but that same rulebook dictates that everyone should pull their own weight.

So, George paid for things because someone had to, and nobody else wanted to be responsible for me. I could feel it every time his card came out. It wasn’t generosity. He wasn’t willing. He was just the unlucky one on whom that responsibility had fallen.

At the end of the night, I wrote George a check out of desperation to do something. I had the money in my account. That was irrelevant. He refused it, because it was unambiguously pathetic. I did not earn the privilege of his redemption. It wasn’t about the money. It was about humiliation. I needed to feel it. I deserved it. I needed to learn a lesson.

Ten years later, quite unexpectedly, George joined Geoff and me for coffee. He had asked Geoff for my permission to join us, which showed he remembered something of the rift. But once together, we became the same old friends we always were. He didn’t remember a thing about me from that day. He remembered the bachelor party fondly. He wasn’t making a statement. He genuinely didn’t give a fuck.

Apparently, the worst night of my life didn’t exist for anyone else. I had fixated on it for years, believing earnestly that it mattered. I am not sure it is relief that it didn’t. These days, I write off my alcoholic years as sunken costs. But it turns out their meaninglessness has a gravity of its own. It is heavier than the shame I thought I was carrying.

The Bus Connection

September 28, 2025
Romance, Work
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The company I worked for ran on booze. Every party blurred into another round, and every team building ended at a bar. I played along because it was the currency of belonging. I could drink until my edges smoothed, sleep badly, then show up the next morning and that endurance passed for competence. After one of those nights I left fired up, not sloppy but alive in a way that felt like light coming from inside me.

There is a phenomenon I have carried all my life. My internal weather dictates how the world responds. When I am depressed, strangers recoil and treat me like static. When I am manic, people lean in as if caught in a current. I used to dismiss it as delusion. That night on the bus, glowing from drink and something more, I could not. The feedback loop was too real.

The bus smelled like vinyl and sweat. People stared at their phones. It was the kind of quiet where everyone was alone together, sealed off in their own screens. I felt like the only one awake inside that hush, the only one scanning for something beyond.

And yet ahead of me, a woman kept locking eyes with me. Not a glance, but held looks that lingered just long enough. Each time she looked away, she smiled. Each time she came back, the smile was a little wider. By the third time, she dropped her head too quickly, caught in her own embarrassment. She was flirting, plain as day. And it repeated for the whole ride until it was the only thing I could see.

When we pulled into the park and ride, the shuffle began. She angled herself so she ended up beside me as we stepped off into the night. I could feel her looking at me, waiting for me to bridge the distance.

And still I said nothing.

Because what if I was wrong? What if the glances were coincidence, or politeness misread by a man who wanted more from them than was ever there? What if I spoke and the spell collapsed, leaving me exposed as a fool? The glow can make you magnetic, but it can also make you reckless. I did not trust myself enough to risk it.

So I kept walking. I got in my car, and I drove home.

The Office Alcoholic

August 17, 2025
Addiction, Work
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I don’t know what fucking genius in management thought putting a fully stocked liquor fridge in the office kitchen was a good idea. This was 2016, peak startup culture, where “work hard, play hard” meant having beer on tap and calling alcoholism “company culture.”

The fridge appeared one Monday morning like some kind of corporate honey trap. Vodka, the good stuff, not bottom-shelf swill. Ostensibly for “company events” and “team building.” In reality, it was like putting a loaded gun in a room full of depressed people.

I wasn’t the only one with a drinking problem at that company. But I was the known quantity. The guy who reeked of booze at 9 AM meetings. The one who got a little too animated at happy hours and stayed too late at company parties.

So when I started taking little sips here and there. Just a shot of vodka to get through the afternoon slump, I thought I was being discrete.

But apparently everyone was doing it. The bottles emptied faster than management expected. The vodka simply disappeared. It became obvious that employees were treating the company liquor like their personal stash.

The difference was, when management started having meetings about the missing alcohol, only one name came up. Mine.

I wasn’t invited to these meetings, obviously. But I could read the room. The way conversations stopped when I walked by. The knowing looks. The careful avoidance of eye contact. I could piece together exactly what was being discussed in those closed-door sessions with everyone who wasn’t me.

Everyone thought it was me. Every missing bottle. The office alcoholic had struck again.

The reality was probably that I’d taken maybe twenty percent of what disappeared. But once you’re labeled “the person with the drinking problem,” every missing drop gets attributed to you.

That’s when I realized how visible my drinking had become. I thought it was a secret, but actually I’d become a workplace character: the guy with the problem. Everyone knew.

I went to my first AA meeting that week.

Not because I was ready to get sober. Even though the humiliation of being the office alcoholic felt unbearable, I continued to drink myself to sleep every night.

The liquor fridge disappeared shortly after that. Management probably realized it wasn’t the brilliant culture-building move they’d imagined.

But the damage was done. I was the alcoholic. And once that label sticks, it follows you into every interaction, every meeting, every performance review.

The worst part is, they weren’t wrong.

The Walk to Kirkland

August 3, 2025
Addiction, Grief
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It was one of those days where the sky feels fake. Blue in a way that seems digitally retouched. My roommates and I didn’t have plans, just inertia, so we decided to walk from Bellevue to Kirkland. No destination, just movement. The kind of aimless day that makes you feel young and whole and not important.

We laughed a lot. Talked about nothing. Walked too far. It felt good. I felt good.

I don’t remember walking back, but we must have. I was back in the apartment when my phone rang. My dad’s name on the screen. I answered with some joke ready to go. I don’t remember what it was. Doesn’t matter. He cut me off mid-sentence.

“Andy. Andy, this is serious. Jamie died.”

There was a pause. My body heard it before I did. Then I said “I have to go” and hung up. Not out of rudeness. Just because the world went offline.

I got in my car and drove to the store. I bought a fifth of liquor. Came home. I don’t remember anything after that.

It wasn’t even to mourn him. I drank because I didn’t know what else to do. Because grief didn’t have a shape yet but alcohol did. Alcohol had always had its job, and this was its moment.

He was dead. I was gone. And the day, bright and pointless and full of nothing, was over.

labels vs action

January 17, 2016
Uncategorized
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To invoke the label “I’m an alcoholic” has always seemed to derail the conversation. TMI but as an analogy, I remember I had an enflamed gut, the doctor diagnosed me with gastroenteritis. “What is gastroenteritis?” I ask. “Inflammation of the gut.” Worthless circular logic.

Because a label doesn’t necessarily beget action.

So then to say “Well I don’t know that I resonate with labeling such as “Alcoholic”, what about to generalize to ‘Problem Drinker? That’s more behavioral / action-ey’ Because certainly I knew I had problematic drinking tendencies and I needed to behave better / more responsibility to reduce those problems. Except I don’t actually know how to “behave better” because I never fucking do and I would have figured this out by now if it were possible because that’s the solution I’ve always tried for.

So I try to take a step outside of the occasion of drinking: “I have problematic as well as known alcoholic tendencies that necessitate lifestyle changes which may include managing the amount that I drink.”

This is better but it is critically lacking to why specifically does my condition necessitate change other than to mitigate only Bad consequences? Because Risk Aversion is actually not a genuine motivator for me, and leads to question:

“For what greater Good am I in pursuit beyond merely mitigating the Bad?”

The answer is none.

I am pursuing no greater Good because I waste all of my physical time and health away with debilitating behaviors that enable me on a daily basis to never answer that question.

And truly in my heart, if not always my actions, pursuit of the greater good is the highest ideal of myself. The root of the issue is that I am not on that path.

So to be that person, and not to be the person I am that I don’t particularly like, there is one very specific task I can perform immediately to that end – to begin the journey, I must know Where I Am Going by answering the question “For what greater Good do I pursue beyond merely mitigating the Bad?”

In order to first answer that question, I must become sober, because otherwise I never will.

I don’t mean to cheapen the context of this lovely quote, but it has oddly stayed with me through the years: “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” – Anne Frank


addiction

January 10, 2016
Uncategorized
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It’s difficult to say. I want to spell out some great glamourous come-to-jesus that somehow finely captures and delivers the true emotionality of it. I want to be heroic, brave, strong, and brilliant, with some triumphant conviction to know and declare I will get through this.

But I am not yet any of those things, I am an addict.

I have a permanent chemistry that is deeply and markedly different from someone without my affliction. Permanently. I broke it. Or maybe I was already broken. It doesn’t matter because that’s just how it is now.

With or without any substances I am this person, I have been this person, I will be this person.

There is no going back, there is no other way forward, no other way it could have been; only a permanent uphill battle that’s now even more challenging than the insurmountable task it already is for someone “normal” – something I have never been, and never will be.

Everything I’ve read is so disheartening, about timelines and struggles. I’m actually worried that support groups will sooner break my heart than heal it. I will find this out first-hand but this is all so new to me. I think I’m past the worst of it in the short term, the booze and Adderall took a greater toll on my health than since.

But solving the bigger issue now is all the rest of everything.

Which is the same it’s always been, and always will be.

For now, I’m no better off than this fictional entity I’ve been playing the part, or who I wanted to be.

But that person is trapped, and I must leave him behind.

 

“Once a man has changed the relationship between himself and his
environment, he cannot return to the blissful ignorance he left.
Motion, of necessity, involves a change in perspective.” – Commissioner Pravin Lal, “A Social History of Planet”